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ARCHITECTURE COMMENTARY

Dark shadows loom for Vizcaya

Posted on Sunday, March 25, 200

ARCHITECTURE COMMENTARY

Dark shadows loom for Vizcaya

By BETH DUNLOP
bdunlop@MiamiHerald.com

Vizcaya is our most esteemed architectural jewel. . Yet on Tuesday, the Miami City Commission will vote on a proposal to build three condominium towers that would permanently transform Vizcaya by blocking the vista to and through its exquisite formal gardens.

The three proposed towers would rise to 410 feet, 367 feet and 304 feet and contain 300 luxury condominiums on 6.7 acres of bayfront that Mercy Hospital agreed to sell for $98 million. To build 300 Grove Bay Residences, the developers have assembled a high-end team of designers, including Miami-based Arquitectonica and Swiss landscape architect Enzo Enea. It could be a dream team elsewhere, but not here.

The condos themselves are envisioned as being so luxurious that they would be bought -- according to the 300 Grove Bay Residences website -- as ''second, third and fourth home[s].'' Taken to the logical end, this would mean that some 300 world travelers would get the privilege of blotting the landscape, forever destroying an aesthetic experience that is ours, to enjoy South Florida's beauty for a couple of weeks a year.

At one level, the issue seems simple. There's a script in which our elected public officials would rise up to protect our most significant work of architecture. Aesthetics and landscape would surpass the compulsions of developers, and elected officials would give the straightforward two-letter response to proposals like 300 Grove Bay Residences.

But this is Miami. And this is the 21st century. And nobody seems to be able to say ''no,'' even when it is so obviously the right answer. The rezoning and land use change that paves the way to the condos got a first-reading approval in a 3-2 Miami City Commission vote in January, and on Tuesday, the issue comes back before the city in a special hearing. The hearing will include not just the final vote on the land use issues but a public hearing on the Major Use Special Permit that the project would require.

The condos have an array of opponents, starting with Vizcaya's own governing Trust, as well as the support group, the Vizcayans. Dade Heritage Trust and the Miami-Dade Historic Preservation Board also are against it; the effort to reduce the height of the condo towers has the support of the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

Last month, the Vizcayans did a most persuasive study in which architect Richard Heisenbottle created computer-simulated images showing just how profoundly the view from the house and gardens would change.

The images are compelling, and shocking, with the towers forming a visual wall, terminating the long, elegant axial view through the gardens. These condos are each, basically, twice as tall as they should be in order to stay out of sight, which is the only place they belong. This view should be accorded the same level of protection that the architecture has been given. (And should one doubt that there is precedent for this, one can turn to the court cases that have thus far protected the painter Frederick Church's house Olana near Hudson, N.Y., from visual intrusion; the views there basically tell the story of the Hudson River School of Painting.)

Vizcaya, the winter home of the industrialist James Deering, was completed in 1916. It is a National Historic Landmark, by far one of the finest house museums in America, designed in the fashion of an Italian Renaissance villa by architects F. Burrall Hoffman and Paul Chalfin and gardens by Diego Suarez. Though Deering died in 1925, the estate remained in the family until the mid-1940s, when the family sold off most of the land -- part of it became the Bay Heights neighborhood and the rest went to the Catholic Archdiocese -- and in 1952, transferred the house and remaining 50 acres to Miami-Dade County for $1.4 million.

In the ensuing decades came LaSalle High School, St. Kieran Church and Mercy Hospital, much landfill and even more concrete where once the land was kept wild. The school and church are part of the Archdiocese, but the hospital is operated separately by the Sisters of St. Joseph of St. Augustine. Last year, the hospital board voted to sell off part of its land to raise money for hospital improvements. Two developers, Ocean Land Equities and the Related Group of Florida, partnered to buy it.

Strip this away to its bones, and you start with a hospital that theoretically has a higher calling -- both medically and theologically -- than condos for the very rich. Too, this is an aging country, where the elderly will have ever-greater needs for assisted living, another option for any church/hospital alliance.

To date, Mercy and the Archdiocese have not been especially good institutional caretakers of the land, turning far too much of it into concrete. Though the hospital's requirements for physical upgrading and better equipment are real (the going figure for needed improvements is $200 million), this might be better addressed by upgrading the whole site, not selling it off piecemeal. There are creative options that might not only help the hospital but enhance it.

But that is just part of the puzzle.

A city law, known as the Grosvenor ordinance, prohibits any land zoned for governmental-institutional use from being changed to a residential use with a density higher than the surrounding neighborhoods. But city zoning officials have decided that the Mercy land falls into an unexplainable loophole and can have the densest residential zoning of R-4. But one loophole leads to another, as we all know, which could mean that all of the churches and private schools in Miami would, in turn, be allowed to sell off land for high-rise development.

In this case, the stakes are especially high, because it is Vizcaya. Think of it: we pay thousands of dollars to visit the villas, palaces, chateaus and palazzos of Europe because they teach us history and offer us unfettered beauty. In the United States, we tour the great historic houses of Newport, of the Hudson Valley. We detour for miles to go to Biltmore House or William Randolph Hearst's San Simeon. One can't imagine this happening to any of them.

Vizcaya is as important as any of them. There is no other place like it. To abuse it is to begin to lose it. We must not let that happen, especially for the sake of 300 private luxury condo units.

http://www.miamiherald.com/277/story/50762.htm